Received a work email asking me to vote in EU elections, told those who do not vote support wrong people.

So like the title says, I received an email today from work appealing for a vote in the EU elections. There are a few lines that struck me as incorrect or unusual.

The first being "cast your vote and strengthen Europe"

The second and most questionable is

"Those who do not vote support the wrong people."

I work for a large healthcare company from Germany and the attached letter came through on work emails using work templates.

The letter reads

Letter from

Appeal for the European elections on 26 May 2019

Dear colleagues in Europe,

Today I address a personal appeal to you as a member of staff of the companies in all EU member states: Please take part in the election of the new European Parliament on 26 May 2019! Cast your vote and strengthen Europe.

In our anniversary year, we are particularly aware of how much courage and visionary power are required to set the right course for the future, even under challenging conditions. As a company with headquarters in , we are therefore involved in the "Lower Saxony for Europe" initiative.

If we look back at the past history of Europe and the world wars, the EU is an unprecedented guarantor of peace. We should not forget that was deprived of its livelihood through expropriation as a result of the Second World War.

We all take the freedom of the markets in Europe for granted, our children know nothing else. Until recently, a Brexit seemed unimaginable. Now we are all experiencing how difficult it is to deal with the outcome of a vote against the European idea.

The future of Europe is at stake. Should the influence of extreme and nationalist interest groups increase more than the will of the people of Europe due to a low turnout, we will not live up to our responsibility for future generations. Those who do not vote support the wrong people. 2 / 2

There may still be a long way to go before everything in Europe is as uncomplicated and boundless as we would like it to be. But it is worth the effort. Please take the opportunity.

Best regards,

Yours

Any help or advice would be great. Even if it means absolutely nothing would be good to know.

Which country are you in? In northern Ireland this could well fall into legally shakey ground but Scotland, England, Wales it's fine. They aren't requiring you to or coercing you to vote for a particular party/candidate, they are encouraging participation.

Sounds like a poor translation - I think that they mean that those who don't vote are effectively supporting the people who they didn't vote for and therefore the people who aren't working for their interests - by that definition literally 'the wrong people' .

A thing you'll hear often in Germany is "If you don't vote, you vote brown (Neonazi/rightwing)", to say that no matter what party you vote for, just using your vote means the radical right wing parties get a bit less of the cake. (provided you don't vote right wing parties yourself, ofc.) There's a few different sentences like this to encourage people to vote even if they feel like their voice doesn't matter, because the least it does is help drown out the brown voices.

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That sentence was a bit messy, but yeah I can see it being a weird translation.

You recall completely incorrectly. The Nazis never won more than 37% of the vote in free and fair elections to a Reichstag that was elected by proportional representation (and only 43% in the last contested Reichstag election), and it would always have been possible to stop Hitler from becoming Chancellor or holding any office of government. He was put in power by conservative partners who persuaded President von Hindenburg to appoint him on the grounds that he could be easily controlled by his coalition partners, which backfired rather spectacularly three months later when he seized dictatorial power and got the Reichstag to agree to it.

I mean that's propably the root for these statements. It says if YOU don't vote, the radical right and Neonazis will have a bigger impact, because they get their people to vote for sure. These are sayings born out of our history, to create an understanding of the fact that you need to participate in a democracy in order for it to work properly and keep anti democratic powers out. Yes, he was voted into office. That just shows how important it is to use your voice to tip the scale in favor of, you know... NOT Nazis.

It's not that Hitler gained power through majority endorsement at the ballot box, but that in a seemingly democratic country (maybe not so different to many modern democracies) he was still able to gain autocratic powers.

Sounds to me like “please vote, it is important, we don’t want a bunch of racists getting elected, and also Brexit is fucking irritating”. Slightly inappropriate in a work setting, but not exactly a shocking sentiment for a German company to express.

No, the EP elections over all of the EU are from the 23rd to the 26th because each country has its own preferred day of the week for voting. In the UK the elections are being held on Thursday 23rd of May only. No counting of the votes will take place anywhere in the EU until the last polls are closed on Sunday 26th of May.

There's no sign of him in the published lists of candidates for the South East region, or of the name of the man who was under the bucket in 2017.

His last tweet indicated that he was reconsidering due to the size of the response and the potential of a novelty candidate to have serious impact on the result under the electoral system used for European Elections in Great Britain.

Legally, it's fine, there's no issue with it. You're not being encouraged to vote one way or another, just to vote.

Bear in mind too, that your company being German, the impetus for this is quite likely not to be Germany's current issues with Neonazi groups etc, which flare up periodically, and are usually accompanied by a large amount of eurosceptic rhetoric. As you can imagine, the Germans aren't shy about denouncing Naziism.

I suspect that the 'wrong people' part of the email is a reference to Neonaziism, but it may also be a poor phrasing by a native German speaker.

Either way, don't worry - they aren't making you do anything in terms of your voting, and if they tried, they would be breaking the law.

I once worked for a large UK media company who's chairman had been a conservative MP and still maintained links to the party.

In a series of employee strategy / Q&A events in the run-up to a general election he told staff that if they voted in a labour government he would certainly have to make cuts to the size of the workforce.

I was pretty irked but not surprised, I generally found him to be a pretty odious creature but I assumed it was still legal (if if it was pretty cynical, coercive behaviour).

IANAL but are you sure about that? It's pretty clear that they are encouraging a vote for pro-EU candidates, and denouncing anti-EU candidates as "extreme and nationalist".

Like I say, no idea if that's legal or not (and I used to work for a company who had pretty much the opposite view and weren't shy in expressing it either), but I think there's pretty clear encouragement there.

If it was illegal, Wetherspoons would be having a bit of an issue right now wouldn't they?

Weren't they failing pubs on their internal audits if they didn't display Pro-Brexit material? I'd say a single, ambiguously worded email is less questionable than officially recording the non-compliance of employees to display political propaganda.

It's not illegal. As someone else mentioned, it looks like a poor translation job and a cultural misunderstanding. It's common in Germany for companies to have social policies and be engaged with the philosophy of voting. They were trying to engage people with the process, rather than force people to vote a specific way.

They are just telling you to vote. They aren't telling you who to vote for. It's a good idea to vote, democracy relies upon it. Why on earth the company you works for feels the need to officially remind you of that I have no idea.

There's probably someone on the board who's big in to politics and feels like they are going to use their position in the business to motivate people to be as interested as they are.

This happened before the referendum. JCB and other companies were asking all their employees to vote remain. Whilst I don't like the idea of what your employer has done, if you feel as though they're crossing into your personal life or making you feel as though your employment is in danger by not voting how they want then you have something.

Honestly I voted leave and I would again. Parliamentary sovereignty is supreme to me and I believe in it more than the EU. But if my employer told me how to vote then I'd just raise a greivance and do what I need to ensure they don't breach GDPR or make my employment feel threatened.

I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain.

Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created. That I didn’t have anything to do with.

I'd suggest that the individual who has sent that e-mail won't be employed by your company for much longer.

I think while it might be on the company's letterhead, and has been distributed through the company's e-mail system, I'd truly be astonished if it was actually an official, endorsed company communication. Rather I think someone's got it into their head, with the best intentions in the world, to encourage people go out and vote "their way" and they've used the biggest and most effective communications network at their disposal to do it.

I'd put money that HR sends an e-mail out later today disavowing any particular political leaning in one direction or the other, and informing you that the contents aren't reflective of the companies attitudes or policies to political diversity.

Every single line that you wrote is patently false. There is a practice called "company discretion", and I can guarantee a large healthcare provider checked the legality of sending such an email before X employee sent it.

You don't think that a German company who relies heavily on trade with Britain won't take any and every opportunity to make sure that their favoured MEPs get elected? Companies are not obligated to encourage " political diversity" because it's not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.

Respectfully, what I stated was opinion. At no point did I make any assertions of fact. Describing at as "patently false" isn't really all that accurate - "wrong" might be a better description, but that is subjective. Though I'll stipulate that my opinion seem being the minority one.

My reading is that "" isn't someone in a position of authority within the company but rather is a regular employee of the company and wouldn't have been authorised to send such e-mails to with such a wide distribution. I've assumed (for lack of anything indicating otherwise) that the e-mail was sent by some well meaning, non-managerial worker as opposed to someone in the management chain - based on my having never seen an e-mail like that ever having been sent by anyone in management before. If I did ever receive one it would certainly take me by surprise.

Given that assumption, I doubt whether the company's legal department actually had opportunity to review it beforehand, and from that position I've expressed my opinion that it would likely garner some kind of official retraction and further action.

I'm not, and do not, deny a comapny's right to send such communications and I'm not making a claim that political stances are in some way protected under equality legislation. I'm well aware that they're not and I'm well aware that companies have a vested interest in seeing certain political outcomes and that they take steps to ensure that they do.